I'm an Emmy-winning former NBC and Wall Street Journal reporter turned speaker and strategist on quotability, connective behavior and making places and conferences more meaningful by storyboarding them. I’ve been a state senator’s chief of staff, co-founder of nine PACs, founding board member of Annie’s Homegrown and coached over 30 pre-IPO teams. Like you, perhaps, I am inordinately curious about why we do what we do. I also write for the Huffington Post and Harvard Business Review and am the author of Moving From Me to We, Resolving Conflict Sooner, Walk Your Talk and Getting What You Want. Let's share ideas at www.sayitbetter.com, Moving From Me to We and @kareanderson

Spread Your Key Idea To Grow Your Life's Work With Others

Dog whisperer, Cesar Millan, “runs with as many as sixty-five dogs at time – many of them pit bulls with histories of aggression – without leashes or other kind of restraint,” writes John Butman. That’s because of a life-changing discovery earlier in his life when he saw that, unlike Mexicans, Americans mistakenly let their pet dogs take control. Where he grew up, in Culiacan, Mexico, dogs weren’t trained.They didn’t even have names. But he knew, even as a child, that he had “an uncanny connection with them” and it was by being in charge. That insight spurred him to come to the U.S., get a job at a dog grooming shop to hone his approach, and eventually host a TV show, write books that have sold millions, and appear at huge events around the world – all because of his ability to build a constituency around his core talent-as-idea: “calm assertiveness.”

Warning: Your idea may be so provocative and thus hotly debated that it evokes what Butman dubs hyperventilation, as both Millan and Amy Chua’s ideas have evoked. But let’s first focus on distilling your most deeply-felt idea so you attract others to it.

Unearth Your Big Idea From The Many You Have

In describing how we can “build influence in a world of competing ideas” Butman suggests that we look for “iconic moments”, even from childhood, where an insight grabbed hold of you and persists in your thoughts. That may be the root of the idea that you are to grow, with others, he suggests in his book, Breaking Out. These moments, says Butman, reveal your “fascination aroused” and can be “wellsprings” for growing your standout idea and related talent.

To discover yours, get a good friend who has already heard you talk about what most matters to you. My suggestion? Pick someone who is willing to be persistent and press you in conversation in a quiet room, with a smart device recording your conversation. Butman suggests you ask, “What most fascinates you about your idea right now? This inevitably evokes many general statements and attempts to provide background and context for the interest. Yet that’s just verbal underbrush that obscures your core idea.

After a series of attempts to circle the subject – that’s natural – your friend can press you to go deeper and to get more specific. Your friend might ask, “What’s your favorite example of that idea in action?” or “What’s a what-if dream scenario that comes to mind for your idea in action?” Eventually, your most deeply-felt, core concept will spill out of your mouth. You may be so thrilled that you agree to reverse roles and offer the same opportunity to your friend.

Pull Others Into Acting On Your Idea

To spread your idea, create an online place where people can add or react to it in ways that reinforce what they most like in themselves. Enable them to gain bragging rights: becoming positively visible, especially to those who most matter to them. Butman and others dub this place a platform.Frans Johansson, in The Click Moment, dubs itThe Hook on which others can hang their ideas and more. And one way to attract others to it, suggests Tell to Win author, Peter Guber, is to craft a relevant and purposeful narrative that pulls people into your story because they can picture a role they want to play in it, thus reshaping the story in their eyes and eagerly sharing it with others. Butman calls this effect respiration because, “Once the idea is expressed, it becomes animated. It can breathe on its own…nourished by others.”

1. Your platform could be a book, but don’t stop there. For book launch time, when the news is hottest, build in reasons and ways for people to share and add to the ideas in your book — over at your platform, cited in your book.

2. You may choose to only write an eBook, or self-publish a printed book and eBook, or go with an established publisher yet retain the rights to making an eBook.

3. In any of these three scenarios, be sure to launch an online site where people can share and discover related success stories, books, organizations and other resources and what-if scenarios, — and rate each other’s contributions so the best tips rise to the top of visibility. This nudges site visitors to offer relevant, well-written contributions and sidesteps your need to scold or otherwise manage as many off-base comments.

4. Provide the possibility for comments to be tagged, and searchable by tags, so site visitors can quickly find the tips that most interest them, yet also serendipitously discover other helpful tips, thus staying on the site longer and deepening loyalty to the community.

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Always a delight to get a notice from Forbes in my inbox that you’ve posted Kare and I like to save the reading opportunity for when I can really focus –

1. because I always know it’s going to be a good read 2. because I love the depth that underpins each article, reflected by the multiple backlinks, most of which I will follow and read and which really enrich the story

This was as always value with lots of practical tips, but I was particularly drawn to the idea of creating a MEME –

It’s a simple and powerful idea but and also quite difficult to accomplish in practice –

It prompted me to remember your (excellent) eBook and some of the filmic references you’d used and I remember that when I read it, I noted to myself that I needed to do this exercise.

Always easier to think than to do and somehow always easier to do for others than for oneself!

I will have to go back to it this weekend and look for some pointers on how to get from abstraction (of my big ideas) to something better articulated – a sort of a step by step process for taking your abstract big idea into a tightly articulated meme – unless you can point me to a link – as you may have already written on it?

Dionne, your praise is doubly valued because it is so vividly specific, and has pulled me again and again to your ideas, expressed in other social channels, including here http://www.dionnekasianlew.com/blog/ — thank you!